Tuesday, January 24, 2017

Elite Dangerous in VR

I played around with Elite Dangerous in VR tonight for the first time. I spent about 3 hours straight in VR, which is too much time in VR, as it happens. My eyes are very fatigued as I write this post.

So, what's it like? It's cool. The first couple frame shift jumps I felt a little woozy, which is appropriate punishment for when one violates fundamental laws of physics. Keeping track of targets was way easier when I was able to look through all the glass in the cockpit. This gives me about 180 degrees forward, and 160 degrees above.

I haven't touched Elite Dangerous in over a year. The controls were unfamiliar to me. Not being able to look at the keyboard was a bit of a challenge. As I corrected bindings to put most of the important stuff on my HOTAS (a fancy joystick), everything was a bit easier. Landing gear and cargo scoops (both used fairly frequently) were stuck on the keyboard. Eventually I was able to hit the correct keys blind.

I run "VR Minspec" for the most part. The game ran smooth for me for the two hours or so. The twitch video was a little jumpy - but that's par for the course on this machine. The last hour it was a bit framey at times, and I consistently had some troubles in highly populated areas.

The twitch video is below. A few warnings: My audio was a bit low. The desk-mounted mic does not lend itself to VR. Also, the aforementioned jumpiness pops up a lot. Also, for the first bit there's a black bar on the top of the video. My bad. Hopefully future videos will be cleaner.